


here at the end of all things

by lonelyghosts



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/F, Fish Puns, Quadrant Vacillation, Suicidal Thoughts, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-29
Updated: 2018-05-29
Packaged: 2019-05-15 06:45:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14785487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelyghosts/pseuds/lonelyghosts
Summary: The Handmaid's final duel.





	here at the end of all things

**Author's Note:**

> i'd die for the handmaid and the condesce

She is purple-pink and gold. She is the tallest troll you've ever seen, and you've seen quite a few in your thousands of sweeps. She is proud-backed and regal despite her casual tongue and hand-wave words, her offhand fish puns. She is as cruel as you've been forced to make her, her trident as sharp as her long white teeth that poke out from between her lips. She is the troll you've learned best how to pity and hate in equal measure, and you cannot help but know her. It would be hard not to after your sweeps spent by her side, undone by your clockwork majyyks.

You are one of the only ones who knows her name- the only one left alive, after all this time.

You are her and you are not her and you have lived a thousand lifetimes by her side. Each one of them erased. You have been pale and black and red and ashen for this Empress, and as it is she only knows you are another obstacle in her path. 

Her name is Meenah Peixes.

You do not have a name, yourself. Your employer calls you  _Girl._ Alternia called you the Demoness, but Alternia is dead. The one they named the Signless called you by the name  _Damara_ , and that name is the closest you ever got to one that fit, but it pinched and bruised at the edges.

Damara is a girl with potential and a smile. She does not live forever. She has a lusus who coos over her and she is permitted to keep her filled quadrants instead of making her loved ones unknow her with the smudging of time. She does not attempt suicide at the slightest chance. You are not Damara, though you could have been. 

As it is you call yourself Handmaid. It's as close to what you are as you're ever going to get. 

You lay out your terms. Employment. You try your best to convey how bad of an idea it is but she doesn't listen to you, only hears power. And you want her to say yes despite the fact that you do not want to relinquish her to her fate- you want to die, after all, have wanted it since birth, and here it stands in front of you.

"Clam up, beach," she tells you. "I didn't come all this wave to hear you carp on about terms of agreement or waterever. You gonna stand there waitin for me to krill you, or are we gonna have ourshellves a fight?" 

"Shore," you tell her, and her eyes narrow and she lunges at you, trident out. She always did hate it when you stole her fish puns. 

The worst thing is that it didn't have to come to this. 

You have shaped her childhood and her adulthood and her long, endless reign. You have molded this woman a thousand times. He made you turn her into a cruel and petty creature who steals life with a touch and has never truly loved another troll in this timeline, but in a thousand others she was a brash but kind Empress who was hesitant to admit to the fact that she loved like breathing, loud and funny and firmly committed to doing the right thing.

She used to be your Empress, after all. You used to be her Consort.

At first, it was curiosity. She would take your place at your death, after all- you want to know what made this girl so willing to give herself up for power. Was she willing, a pawn, neither, both? What was she, truly?

You learned that she was proud and snide and more than a little mean, and you hated her a little- this barely full-grown troll standing atop the corpse of her ancestor, trident in hand and tyrian splattering her teeth. She was a fool after all, you decided. Hungry for power and unable to see where it would get her.

But in your first timeline, she noticed you lurking murkily around the palace and called you aside, asked your name. Her eyes went softer when you said you didn't have one, and she said she'd make you her handmaid. She made you tea and told you seadweller folk tales and never asked when you went tight when she asked about your lusus, just moved on. She wrapped her hands around your horns the first night that you pailed and petted your hair as you shuddered through it and you were so pale and flushed for her then that it hurt- you had never loved anyone else like this.

And when- sweeps later- you wept and told her about all of it for the first time, she told you  _take me to that basshole and I'll make sure he goes strait to shell, baby gill._ And by the shine of her eyes you knew that she meant every word of it.

That was the first time that you used your clockwork to go backwards. You could not see her destroyed by him. 

Next time you tried to be more distant, you really did! You made sure to slink out of sight and you only appeared in moments of extreme necessity. You threw endless challenges into her path- stubborn rebels, backstabbing nobles, power-hungry threshcutioners. Every quadrant-bearer that she took betrayed her eventually, and you told yourself that you were not motivated by jealousy but rather by the need to turn her cruel, convince her that no one could be relied upon except herself. 

It was not a convincing excuse. 

You were too bold, too obvious, and she found about you and the way you meddled. You hadn't meant for her to become fascinated with you, but how could she not be? You were a distant, godly creature in that world, dark and glittering, and she had personal experience with distant, monstrous things, having grown up with one.

The first time you slipped up, stayed a second too long, she kissed you bruisingly and you dug your claws in to draw fuchsia, fueled by hatred and the things you'd seen her laugh at. You hated her, hated her so deeply it hurt. She called you her _coddamn fishmesis, and the only one I'd ever want,_ and when she killed the Grand Highblood for trying to pursue some black flirtation with her, you retreated into your familiar clockwork and went back.

Timelines defined themselves by what she was to you. You were pale and she called you her whitest pearl of the deep sea- _my morayeel,_ she called you, and you rolled your eyes at her dumb fish puns even though they warmed your heart. You were red and she said she wanted to save you and you couldn't help but tell her the same- she named you her consort and called you her angelfish. You were black and you wanted only for her to be hurt by you, and you killed thousands for daring to touch her and she did the same for you- you fucked bloody and raw over the bodies of her enemies as she growled _no one gets to touch you except for me, no one gets to hake you except for me, no one does it anywhere near as whale_. You were ashen and you bared your neck for her and made her stop. You stepped between her and a fucking clown once, and she'd rolled her eyes, secretly fond, and say, _you'd otter know that if you weren't my aufishtice I'd krill you just for trying._ You mixed quadrants like the Grand Highblood mixed his bloody paints, red diamonds and gray hearts, pale clubs and black diamonds, red spades and black clubs. You were all things to her and she was all things to you.

In the end he made you go back and shape her as time demanded it.  

She didn't have to be like this- lonely, petty, cruel, sadistic. But you could not defy the man that you are enslaved by, and so despite the way you knew her, despite the way you ached to save her from herself, you built her tall and towering and her worst of all possible selves. 

It hurts to look at her as she is now. It hurts more not to.

The fight is brutal and bloody and long. You bleed rust that glimmers rainbow onto the ground when she nicks your side and feel elated when you feel pain for the first time in thousands of sweeps. It would be so easy to just lie down and die, but you move without knowing it. These sweeps of survival have made your first instinct in a fight be to dodge, to fight back, even when you want to do anything but. 

You make her bleed and she gasps, having gone so long without knowing what hurt feels like and you relish in her pain, hating yourself and her because you are the same, really. Victims. Pawns. You want to take her far away from here, far from Scratch and English and the Felt, and you want her to burn and die you hate hate hate this awful endless life of servitude, of forever wanting to die, of wanting to leave, and you hate her for buying into it, for thinking this will save her because it won't.

The trident sinks into your chest quicker than you can block or dodge. You cough reflexively, and feel pain strike you the way no suicide attempt ever has before. Your legs buckle and you sink to your knees, still coughing, elated at your freedom. 

"Fucking finally," you wheeze through a mouthful of rusty red that dribbles over your lips to stain the ground beneath your knees. Fucking finally, it's over and you're free-

"You shoulda known betta," Meenah crows. You'd almost forgotten that she was there, and you crane your neck back to look at her properly. "Knew it'd take a whale, but I alwaves knew I'd krill you someday. I won, beach."

You laugh at the words, even though it makes her furious, because she still doesn't know. She doesn't know that she has become yet another pawn in Scratch and English's fucking games. Her Imperial Condescension still thinks she's won, and you won't stick around long enough for her to discover otherwise. 

When you die, you are laughing and crying in equal measure. 


End file.
